The Orce region has one of the best late Pliocene and early Pleistocene continental paleobiological records of Europe. It is situated in the northeastern sector of the intramontane Guadix-Baza Basin (Granada, Andalusia, southern Spain). Here we describe a new fossil hominin tooth from the site of Barranco León, dated between 1.02 and 1.73 Ma (millions of years ago) by Electron Spin Resonance (ESR), which, in combination with paleomagnetic and biochronologic data, is estimated to be close to 1.4 Ma. While the range of dates obtained from these various methods overlaps with those published for the Sima del Elefante hominin locality (1.2 Ma), the overwhelming majority of evidence points to an older age. Thus, at the moment, the Barranco León hominin is the oldest from Western Europe.

Hypsodont (i.e. high‐crowned) teeth have been interpreted as an indicator of feeding preferences and habitat selection in ungulates. For this reason, the degree of hypsodonty has been used for estimating the diet of ancient taxa and in palaeoenvironmental reconstructions. The goal of this study is to elucidate the relative importance of grass consumption and open habitat foraging in the development of hypsodont teeth, using novel computer techniques of knowledge discovery applied to a dataset of 134 species of artiodactyls and perissodactyls distributed among thirteen families. The results obtained suggest that high‐crowned teeth represent an adaptation for feeding in an open habitat, although the minimum threshold of hypsodonty seems to increase with the relative length of the anterior part of the jaw. On the contrary, there is no direct relationship between the degree of hypsodonty and the percentage of grass consumed, except for the correspondence between grazing and dwelling in open habitats. A relatively wide muzzle evidences an adaptation for grass foraging in open and mixed habitats, but there are some non‐grazing species from a closed habitat that also show wide muzzles. Thus, the hypsodonty index, combined with the length of the anterior part of the jaw and the width of the muzzle, allows accurate inferences on the ecological preferences of extinct ungulates.

This work examines whether stepwise discriminant function analysis of a suite of craniodental variables enables feeding behaviour and habitat preferences to be identified in fossil ungulates. There are several morphological features of the ungulate skull, mandible and dentition that are well correlated with dietary adaptations, and thus can be used for estimating the feeding ecology of extinct taxa. However, most studies have followed an univariate approach for characterizing the relationship between diet and craniodental structure in extant ungulates (but see Pérez‐Barberia & Gordon, 2001), even though such a relationship has been revealed to be complex because of functional, phylogenetic and biomechanical constraints. In this paper a multivariate perspective is followed, developing quadratic discriminant functions for pairwise comparisons of dietary/habitat groups in modern species. Given that the stepwise method for selecting the morphological variables to be included in the algorithms was used, alternative discriminant functions are provided. Results obtained show that these algorithms reclassify correctly the species according to their feeding and habitat ecology, and thus may be useful for obtaining reliable palaeoautecological inferences (i.e. those related to the life style of extinct species, such as feeding ecology and habitat preferences) when applied to extinct ungulate taxa.

In this article, hypotheses about the origin, evolution and dispersal of Megantereon are reviewed using the fossil specimens included in previous comparative studies as well as the remains identified in the late Pliocene site of Fonelas (Spain) and the early Pleistocene localities of Lantian, Lingyi, Longdan, Renzidong (China), and Untermassfeld (Germany). The validity of the two species proposed by Martínez-Navarro and Palmqvist (1995), Megantereon cultridens and M. whitei, is evaluated using tooth measurements and multivariate statistical methods. The hypothesis of sexual dimorphism as an explanation for the morphological variability of Megantereon is tested with a large sample of sexed individuals of Panthera pardus and Panthera leo. Results obtained indicate similar or even smaller differences in tooth dimensions between M. cultridens and M. whitei than between sexes in both leopards and lions, except in the case of the lower fourth premolar. However, in spite of a substantial overlap between...